On 16 May 2015, at 15:47, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 2:48 PM, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
> wrote:
Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 11:50 AM, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 10:22 AM, Bruce Kellett
Are you seriously going to argue that homo sapiens did *not*
arise by a process of natural selection, aka evolution?
No, Darwinian evolution is my favourite scientific theory.
What I am arguing is that we don't know if consciousness is an
evolved trait. It is perfectly possible to imagine darwinian
evolution working without consciousness, even to the human
intelligence level (producing philosophical zombies).
For example, if consciousness is more fundamental than matter,
then evolution is something that happens within consciousness,
not a generator of it.
That is probably the strongest argument against computationalism to
date.
How so?
So you think that Darwinian evolution produced intelligent zombies,
and then computationalism infused consciousness?
No. What I am saying is that consciousness is not a plausible target
for gradual evolution for the following reasons:
1) There is no evolutionary advantage to it, intelligent zombies
could do equally well. Every single behaviour that each one of us
has, as seen for the outside, could be performed by intelligent
zombies;
2) There is no known mechanism of conscious generation that can be
climbed. For example, we understand how neurons are computational
units, how connecting neurons creates a computer, how more neurons
and more connections create a more powerful computer and so on.
Evolution can climb this stuff. There is no equivalent known
mechanism for consciousness.
I don't know if intelligent zombies are possible. Maybe
consciousness necessarily supervenes on the stuff necessary for that
level of intelligence. But who knows where consciousness stops
supervening? Maybe stuff that is not biologically evolved is already
conscious. Maybe stars are conscious. Who knows? How could we know?
I think we can say that universal numbers are conscious, but they are
self-conscious only when they become Löbian.
So, in a sense, I agree with you, consciousness is already there, in
arithmetic, seen in some global way.
Then it can differentiate on the different computation which will
relatively incarnate/implement those universal numbers.
I think you are going to have to do better than that if you want
comp to be believed by anyone with any scientific knowledge.
Anyone with any scientific knowledge will be agnostic on comp. There
is no basis to believe it or disbelieve it. Maybe it is unknowable.
What we can do is investigate the consequences of assuming comp.
If the classical-comp-physics is different from the empirical physics,
we wll have clues that the classical comp is false.
You really are calling on dualism to explain consciousness -- the
homunculus in the machine.....
I am not trying to explain consciousness. I don't know what
consciousness is
I think you know what consciousness is (you just cannot define it).
or how it originates. What I am claiming is that current science has
nothing to say about it either.
Hmm...
Would you be willing to accept, if only for the sake of a discussion,
the following "consciousness of P axioms" (P for a person):
1) P know that P is conscious,
2) P is conscious entails that P cannot doubt that P is conscious,
3) P, like any of its consistent extensions, cannot justify that P
(resp the consistent extensions) is (are) conscious
4) P cannot define consciousness in any 3p way. (But might with some
good definition of 1p.)
4) comp: there is a level of description of P's body such that P's
consciousness is invariant for a digital substitution made at that
level.
If yes, then current computer science can already explains why
universal machine, or Löbian machine, are already conscious (even just
in arithmetic).
Roughly speaking, consciousness originates from the fact that p -> []p
(the sigma_1 truth get represented in the body/brain of the machine),
and the fact that []p -> p is true, but non justifiable by the
machine. That makes the machine which are developing knowledge, more
and more aware of their possible relative ignorance, and above some
threshold, even wise, as they understand that the augmentation of
knowledge leads to the augmentation of ignorance. The more the lantern
is powerful in the cavern, the more we see that the cavern is big.
Also, that (axiomatic) notion of consciousness has many role, from
speeding up the relative ability of the machine, and augmenting the
degrees of freedom, to distinguishing efficaciously the bad (like
being eaten) from the good (like eaten). It makes also possible to
understand each other, even if quite imperfectly.
Consciousness is what makes possible to internalize some semantic: it
is the sense maker, or the (instinctive) bet of self-consistency, or,
equivalently, of the presence of some reality or some truth.
In the definition of knowledge ([]p & p), consciousness appears to be
more on the side of truth (p), than of []p. It looks like the brain-
body ([]p) is mainly a filter of truth (p) and of consciousness than
the producer.
Also, with comp, zombies are not possible, because you need some body
to make a zombie. And there are none, after the reversal.
Bruno
Telmo.
Bruce
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